Someone Turned This ’80s Mercedes-Benz 190 Sedan Into the World’s Best Meeting Room
Crank up the synthwave—the tape deck still works, too.
The Mercedes-Benz 190 is one of the iconic cars of the 1980s, managing to win hearts with its boxy styling and clean-cut attitude. While these 190s are now things of the past and most remaining samples are nothing but rust buckets, there is one example that you can actually sit and chat in today—and possibly even have a nice drink. Meet the coolest office we've ever seen.
It looks like the lead European ad agency for Mercedes-Benz, Antoni, made the ultimate cozy meeting room for whenever its client drops by its Berlin office. A classic Mercedes-Benz 190 has been transformed into a sitting area, complete with the original houndstooth interior, a working tape deck and a bar built into the trunk.
Overhead is the Mercedes three-pointed star logo in neon to increase the 80s vibes, just in case the chunky stock wheels and plush velour padding around the opening weren't enough.
Mercedes-Benz UK Marketing Director Rob Halloway posted this raddest office ever on Twitter, and frankly, we'd rather be writing in there.
The cozy 190 interior has been opened up with one side of the car as well as the floor taken out of the car, opening up one side and the bottom to the room as a whole. The low cloth seats look like they're at normal desk chair height now, and the front seats were turned around in the interior to face the rear. There isn't a rear bench in the back seat half, but rather, two bucket seats that make that back seat much less awkward to share with a coworker.
They've even kept some semblance of a center console up front, moving the non-driving-related controls up a bit, complete with that working cassette player. If you've ever wanted to interrupt a long-winded boss with the period-correct musical works of David Hasselhoff, here's your chance. (Bonus irritation points: The Hoff really isn't as popular in Germany as the stereotype says he is.)
We reached out to Antoni and Mercedes-Benz for more details on the car and will update this post if we hear back. In the meantime, however, the urge to repurpose a cool t-boned car as a nice sitting area is high.
UPDATE [12/10]: Antoni co-founder and managing director Sven Doerrenbaecher got back to us with the full story of how this 1991 Mercedes-Benz 190 got into the third floor of the agency's Berlin office, and it's a fun one.
The car itself was bought from a used car dealer for about $943 U.S. using today's exchange rate, or €850 in local cash. From there, the Antoni team worked with some "great and crazy" architect friends who transformed the car into the four-person meeting room, complete with a functional fridge in the trunk and that glorious working tape deck.
Getting the car up to the third floor of Antoni's building was perhaps the hardest part, as it involved getting a heavy-duty transporter to tip the car sideways in order to fit through a window. The window had to be uninstalled to pull off that feat, and the car was mere centimeters from each side of its frame when it squeezed through the opening.
The Antoni team even found photos of the previous owner—a policewoman—in the 190's glove compartment. Berlin's largest newspaper, the Berliner Zeitung, featured the find and were able to find the woman, although she declined to appear in a follow-up article on the car.
As for that delightfully retro neon Mercedes logo on the ceiling, it's over 13 feet in diameter and visible from the road below, making it a cool photo spot for passers-by.
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